[roblabla]

> - Build pipeline. Maybe, but you can’t fully build a iOS app on Linux so it didn’t seem like a win.

This is my use case (I implemented notarization API support in rcodesign).

I build MacOS apps entirely from Linux using my own bespoke toolchain, based on osxcross. It can potentially be used to build iOS apps too (I tested it in jest some time ago, but I don't use it for anything serious). This is all done without any of the apple binaries. The toolchain uses nix to pull everything together, clang and other llvm utilities as a compiler, lld as a linker, rcodesign for signing and notarization, and the macOS/iOS SDK for headers and tbd files used for linking. And a bit of custom glue code in bash to hold it all together.

The reason I do this is simple: My CI is entirely Linux-based. I already cross-build windows binary from Linux. This makes CI so much easier, as everything can be containerized, and thus run on most standard CI offerings. I only need to bring Windows and macOS VMs to run test suites. Because VM bringup is slow and somewhat fragile, pushing everything to run in Linux containers is a huge win.

It also gives me a lot more control when things inevitably break. Being open source, rcodesign can be trivially changed, be it to add more logging, or add new features. For instance, rcodesign has a remote signing mechanism! This isn't something that exists in the normal codesign implementation.